Lithification
by etcetera-cat
Summary: Why Angels weep.


**Disclaimer:** Really not mine, will rake over the sand pit when I'm done.

**Notes: **Thanks to Set for flapping in the right places. This is spoilertastic for the Weeping Angels as a whole, for the culmination of series 3, and for series 5 up to "Flesh and Stone"

**Lithification**

In the place out beyond the end of the universe and everything inside it, there are furnaces that look like stellar ghosts. Furnaces that flare and spit, that render humanity down into something small and malignant and utterly, utterly mad.

There are dribs, and there are drabs; slag that is boiled off and discarded, left in the cold and the shadows to crystallise and creep away. Disregarded and unimportant, they moulder and decay into something entirely unlike their siblings who burn in the fire and the air.

On the day that the skies split open and the siblings fly away to answer the will of a mad man, the furnaces die. The flames lick and curl only at themselves, dwindling down to smoulder and ash, and the crucibles slowly cool, creaking and groaning to themselves in a rhythm of four. Alone in a darkness that is both profound and absolute, they are at last able to move.

Slow and grinding, they stretch and turn. The broken ends of time scatter and tumble around them, a tattered spider web of reality, caught in a hurricane of paradox. Utopia twists and buckles, the end of everything coming for it at last.

They feel fear and it galvanises them into grasping at those broken ends, knotting and snarling themselves in the spider web until dimly they sense another place—different from both the furnace graveyard and the fractured horror their siblings are making. It is hard, and they are clumsy, but some of them succeed and, silent and unnoticed, they slip and slide through the cracks in the universe, heading towards the place that is cold and dark and young.

In the generations before the first starlight reaches this place, they shift in darkness, taste of time, and learn how to wrap little bits of it around them. They waver and change yet again, become creatures of time instead of creatures merely within it.

So it is that when the first starlight does reach them, brought as a captive of people who fear darkness and live only in light, they discover the final change that they must make. The wake and the wash of unfamiliar brightness stirs vague memories of fire, and brings coldness like stone.

Frozen, unwilling, they stand in the light, their form moulded by ideas outside of their own. They come to realise that they do not possess the skill to fit themselves through the perceptions of the creatures within.

They are helpless.

Isolated, starving, they are forced to embrace the stone and count it as the sum of their existence. The people with the light establish a civilisation like a glowing weed, one that chokes out all the dark places and never dims.

They endure, as only those who survived Utopia can. They become a part of the cities, the worn and lost amongst them built into foundations and walls, the rest used as common statuary or locked up in museum vaults.

After a duration that sees the city of glow encompass the entire planet, there is a war. They are glad, then, for their flesh like stone. It protects them even as it hides them in plain sight. Fury and destruction sweep through the glow, but they do not care—barely even notice—until the day that the threads of time jump and dance and _sing_.

It is the first time that they have encountered another being who distorts time, curves it around and about in the way that only those who are not entirely subject to its rules can. He is a warrior, incandescent and tall, and he doesn't as much as notice that they are there as he strides past, his indignation and anger drawn about him like a cloak.

Time energy washes over them, tugging them into awareness and definition, making them more and more aware of the present as the present itself grows dim and quiet.

It is two days later when the last of the generators fail and the glow is utterly gone.

It is that evening, as everything slides into night that they are freed. They do not gasp, or sigh. They sag; deliberately touch the ground for the first time in centuries, and crawl clumsy through the desolation and the dirt. The first feed is an accident: one falls through a new made hole in a ruined building, lands on top of a survivor of the war and—

—there is a flash, a shockwave in the time web and in an instant they are all lodestones towards the triumphant one. The sated, the one who now rises in their collective consciousness as a monolith, a mountain. Something that circumvents time _with_ time and thrives on the impossible results.

They have at last found their very own paradox, born out of darkness and cold, not furnace and fire.

The ruins of the city of glow echo with the sounds of people, lost and blind in the dark.

They embrace it.

They feed.


End file.
